Highlights

CSC Fulbright Scholar
Dr. Somdatta Mandal
of Visva-Bharati University in Santiniketan, India

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Dr. Mandal gave a faculty seminar on Friday, April 24th, 2009 at 3:45 pm through the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues. Her talk focused on

"Globalization and the Indian ImagiNation:
Seeking New America."

Indian political leaders, writers and academics have engaged with the idea of the nation and the various processes, practices and manifestations of nationalism in an exceptionally sustained manner. In the 21st century, when the world is considered to be a global village and when national boundaries leave us more exposed and vulnerable to neo-colonial multinational exploitation and global annexation, the question of the imagined nation (also deconstructively hinted at through the word ‘ImagiNation'in the title) becomes more significant. While many postcolonial critics cry hoarse about the hegemonic domination of the West and the ‘coca-cola-ization' of Indian culture, the opposing views of welcoming it seem equally, or at times, even more interesting.

Whenever Europeans immigrated to the New World (America), they named their new settlements with the names of the original places they came from and just added the word ‘New' to it. In a debut documentary film called Road to America, a young filmmaker Aloke Shetty explores how reversing this European trend, some thirty years ago, a remote village called Laurdiyan in Rajasthan renamed itself “New America” without any western hegemonic pressures at all. The interviews that he conducted with the different villagers -- the schoolteacher, the barber, the businessman, the sarpanch, and others -- sometimes humorously and sometimes seriously, all cite different reasons for such a nomenclature. Along with video clips, my presentation will highlight some of these issues about the layman's notion of a nation. It will also explore why the ‘imagined community' is thought to be more constricting and undesirable than a more narrower ghettoistic ‘organic community' or ‘knowable community'.  

Dr. Mandal has published two academic books, Film and Fiction : Word into Image (2005), and Reflections , Refractions , and Rejections: Three American Writers and the Celluloid World (2004). Her current research and teaching interests are Multiculturalism and the American Context; Literature and Culture of the Asian Diaspora; Colonialism/ Post Colonialism; South Asian Writing in English; Women's Studies; Film and Media Studies.

At Visva-Bharati University, she teaches courses at the Bachelor and Masters levels, including Nineteenth and Twentieth Century English Literature, English and American Fiction, Colonial/Postcolonial Literature, English Composition, and guides doctoral research in English. At Calcutta University and Rabindra Bharati University, she teaches The Contemporary World Novel , British Fiction , and American Literature .

Dr. Mandal spent the spring 2009 semester at Dickinson as a Fulbright scholar and taught English 101: South Asian Literature and Film. Additionally, she contributed to the South Asian Diaspora Mosaic organized by CSC.